procurement

When it comes to procurement, everyone that is in the industry will tell you that it is a hard thing to handle as well as master. However, as the times have changed, the way procurement managers work with the procurement of services have also evolved alongside technology. E-procurement has been around for years now and if you ask anyone directly linked in the business, they will tell you that it’s a very daunting system that takes some time to get used to. E-procurement is not for the faint hearted and e-procurement systems can help your business immensely if you figure out the right way to get it done!

Are you an aspiring entrepreneur who has been thinking of setting up your own business but lack the courage to do so? Perhaps you already have a plan, but there’s a multitude of reasons why entrepreneurship is risky. From the lack of resources, to losing sleep, to possibly ending up in a pile of debts, the inertia to start seems pretty high.

However, there has never been a better time to start your own business than 2017. Here are some reasons to motivate you to take the first steps in starting up your own company.

In our previous articles, we defined the concept and key activities of spend analysis using a basic business process. We revealed that the core function of spend analysis is to assign material categories which represent the supply market view to payment data incurred at the organisation level. This concluding article will help to define the material categories, and some metrics that could be adopted to manage the spend analysis program.

As stated in our previous article, it is common for spend data to be extracted from accounting and financial systems. These systems are reliably maintained to provide payment data in currency units. It follows that spend data extracted from accounting systems do inherit a number of accounting terms with it, and these terms do not match Procurement’s view of the supply market. Let us use an example to illustrate the situation.

In our previous article, we introduced a high-level spend analysis process, and the considerations for defining the program. We will now examine the process steps of data extraction and data validation.Continue reading “Spend Analysis – Part 2”

As stated in our previous article, the importance of spend analysis to support Procurement cannot be over emphasised. At the same time, the spend analysis topic is also one of the most misunderstood among business users and Procurement alike. So the intention of this and the next few articles is to dispel some myths about spend analysis, and answer the questions that were seldom asked about the topic.

In our previous article, we highlighted the difference of spend from expenses. While expenses stated in financial statements contain accounting entries such as depreciation and inventory write-off, spend reflects the actual money paid by an organisation to external parties, regardless of whether they are used to pay for services, products or assets. In this article, we leave the detailed definition of spend and analysis methods behind for a while, and start to look at the key performance metrics that are relevant to Procurement.

If you had followed our previous article, you would have understood the structure and key elements of Procurement. Now when you are ready to implement a new procurement function, a key question is the resources that are needed in the new function and its scope. In other words, “What is the size of the problem?”Continue reading “Indirect Spend And Potential For Procurement”

When you run your own business, you definitely understand the value of the money you’ve put into the business. Owning a business or a start-up company is a huge responsibility and every decision you make will definitely have a domino effect on the business as a whole. As a corporate employee, you also have a duty to your company to ensure that you get the best deal for the company.

One of the most important decisions is to negotiate prices with your vendors to ensure a good inflow of services that your company needs. This decision making should be taken seriously and it’s good to always have someone else help you with these decisions. This article by ThunderQuote seeks to help with that.

In our previous article, we highlighted the difference between Direct and Indirect Procurement. Professionally managed indirect procurement has grown in importance in the last 15 years or so. For organisations who implemented such an initiative, the result was a convincing one. In this article, we introduce Procurement as a business function for organisations who have yet to embark on the journey. It is best to keep in mind that the Procurement function should act as the focal point for an organisation to interact and work with the supply or selling markets; synonymous to the Sales and Marketing functions who act as the channel to the customer or buying markets.